


The Haunting of the Screaker Ghost

by Rennll



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Artistic Liberties, Birthday Presents, Don't actually own the game, Gen, Letters, Necklaces, Pre-Timeskip | Academy Phase (Fire Emblem: Three Houses), Reminiscing, Worldbuilding, all over the place, tangents
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-24
Updated: 2021-01-20
Packaged: 2021-03-18 21:08:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28873593
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rennll/pseuds/Rennll
Summary: Birthday notwithstanding, these three days of Claude's school life would have been perfectly normal if Lysethia hadn't seen a ghost on evening one.
Kudos: 1





	The Haunting of the Screaker Ghost

It was at night — the twenty fourth of the Bluesea Moon — that Lysithea saw her first ghost. When she opened her eyes ( maybe it had been the rattle of claws against her desk that had woken her ) it stood not more than a couple of meters away, lupine head perked and tail swaying. A red glow emanated from it, light that shifted like the lifeblood of a living amber stone along the streamlined body and down four slender legs. What else but a ghost would look like that?  
In a moment of overbearing “I knew it” feeling, she wished she could have jumped out of bed and shouted to the world:  
– Ghosts are real. I told you. All of you, and no one believed me. Idiots every single one of you.  
If that was too much to ask, she could at least be allowed to scream. She would rather howl in terror than lay paralyzed in bed, beyond the ability to draw a proper breath. She peeked over the edge of the covers, eyesight becoming super sensitive for the sole purpose of letting her see her fear more clearly: each individual whisker, trembling whenever it sniffed the air, and how the muscles contracted beneath the gleaming hide as it moved.  
She expected some noise to come out of its jaw when it looked like air was passing in and out — a spirit’s lamenting sigh — but it was entirely soundless as it peered at her many books stacked atop the shelf in alphabetical order, then at her studies on the desk, letters, pens … It swept its eyes, spots without iris and pupil, toward the bed, perhaps having heard her drumming heart. She clasped her eyes shut, praying to the goddess that it would think she was asleep, her most frantic prayer in years.  
Trapped in the darkness behind her eyelids, she strained to hear padding from sneaking paws, but the only sound that seemed to exist in her chamber was the muffled whine from the wind blowing outside. Wait, she felt something. A pressure on the covers below her feet. Had it jumped onto her bed? The pressure was moving upward. In her imagination she saw the ghost walking toward her head, eyes burrowing into her skin down to her soul. It knew that she was only feigning sleep. The long snout opened to reveal gleaming sharp fangs …  
She snapped her eyes open to see — nothing. There was nothing in her room. Not daring to turn her head, in case the ghost was merely hiding and watching, she shifted only her eyes from side to side, straining until it felt like they might pop out of their sockets. The desk, each and every shelf and all the dark corners showed no glowing figure. The chamber laid dormant as if the whole experience had been a dream.  
Had it been a dream?  
Her neck was prickling as it usually did when she was studying some book or artifact, and the need to figure something out became so intense it affected her physically. She wanted to run over to the desk and look for prints, glowing hairs, or a paper moved from its rightful place — anything that proved that she hadn’t imagined things, but what if the ghost was waiting for her to reveal herself?  
Lay still and count to three hundred. Don’t move or even blink until you have reached three hundred. That felt like an excellent compromise between terror and curiosity. Focusing on keeping her breathing steady and not mouth the numbers with her lips, she started counting. Soon after she passed the one hundred mark she became glad that she had waited.  
First the head appeared, not from inside her closet or beneath the bed, but from within the chest where she locked away any volatile magic material she worked with, in the event that somebody she invited over turned out to be a sticky fingered idiot. The padlock was still on. The ghost was pushing itself through solid oak. Inch by inch, like it was a wall of syrup. When at last the tail had reappeared, it flickered its ears and sauntered over to her door, then the light exuding from it dimmed (her boots visible through its body) and it sank through her door as well.  
As soon as it was completely gone, she sprung upward. The air trapped in her lungs was let out, drawn in again, then out, in, out, in …  
There had been a ghost in her room. A ghost in her room. It had walked through solid surfaces.  
It took a while before she realized she had thrown away the covers and rushed across the floor, grabbing the silky white dressing gown that hung in the wardrobe. Not until she was fumbling with the knot around her midsection, did her head catch up.  
Was she about to go after it? Why was she about to go after it?  
Lysithea did not know yet the most perplexing paradox concerning ghosts: the more shaken you became upon spotting them, the stronger the urge to see them “just one more time” became.

The twenty fourth of the Bluesea Moon also happened to be Claude’s birthday.  
It had been a good one: Teach had invited him to tea; Lorenz had made sure all of their classmates congratulated him, because the guy would act cordial toward even his most despised adversaries — perhaps even this-person-speared-me-in-the-gut level of adversary — if proper manners required him to act so; and Raphael had brought him a box full of almyran trinkets to choose a gift from.  
Luckily, nobody seemed to have noticed his face going pale at that last part. For a second he’d been ready to believe that Raphael, of all people, had figured out he hailed from Almyra, and used the box to tell him that the cat was out of the bag. So much relieved air went out of him when Raphael explained that the trinkets were initially collected for his little sister’s birthday, but that a lot of cute presents had been left over, “even though my sis got the cutest one”.  
Hilda, cringing in the background, had mumbled about the gifts being womens’ finery. As soon as he heard her voice, Raphael had declared with boisterous excitement that he’d almost forgotten to credit her for being the one to give him the idea to travel to the border, and helping him make actual presents out of the “rocks and stuff”.  
With an arm that was too strong for even a Goneril to fight against, he’d pushed a flustering-more-than-Claude-had-ever-seen Hilda in front of the gift receiver. When he’d smirked, held up his chosen necklace and thanked her “so much for this cute gift which really flatters my neckline, I promise to wear it every day” she had looked delightfully shocked, a person who had had her perceptions about mens’ preferences pulled like a rug from underneath her feet, then she remembered who was telling her this, and had puffed her chins outward in a ha-ha- very-funny scoff.  
Others showed keen interest in the souvenirs, which led to Raphael offering the rest of the class a gift as well. For all that the general opinion of almyrans was that they were savages, his fellow Golden Deer had nothing but praise for their craftsmanship, admiring opals, amber stones, salt crystals and polished tablets of gleaming ebenholts.  
Claude had found himself smiling without meaning to. A moment of weakness — letting a somewhat patriotic ego feed on the positive comments about his home culture. He considered himself pretty much immune to flattery otherwise, at least the kind that boot kissers deployed in an effort to curry favors with the future alliance leader, but compliments that were indirect and unaware were perhaps safe to take to heart, a tiny bit at least.  
Especially the scrypt, etched into the trinkets, had caught his classmates’ fancy. Nearly all of the stones wore charms that were supposed to grant the wearer protection or beauty. Of course, Claude was the only one who could read them, but he kept a tally on who among the classmates made the most accurate guesses. It turned into a wonderful competition within his own mind.  
Hilda scored highest. It was probably cheating that she had grown up right next to the border. The real comedy gold however, the things he wished he’d written down, had been provided by those who were way off the mark.  
Raphael and Leonie were the worst contenders by far. It was unreal how out there their guesses became ( a curse that turned people into dogs — really Leonie? ). Then there was Lysithea. At first, claiming she could easily translate the script by drawing upon her knowledge of diachronic linguistics, then driving herself to the brink of madness in her attempts. He had to agree with her: it was aggravating how two languages that supposedly shared common roots still looked like they originated from different planets. If his mother hadn’t taught him her native tongue when he was little he doubted he would have ever learned to speak it fluently.  
Ignatz won the award of overthinking his answers. Finally Claude felt obliged to point out that a single letter on each trinket was probably not enough to convey the entire life history of the craftsman who had produced them. Marianne was too tentative to voice any guess out loud, which was almost as much of a shame as Lorenz turning out to have decent deduction skills. Claude had been hoping for him to spout ridiculous ideas that knocked Leonie’s werewolf- theory out of the park, only for him to show a disappointingly grounded and logical side. It simply felt weird and unnatural that he of all people would be the first one to point out that since the trinkets were clearly intended as womens’ finery, then maybe, just maybe, the script meant something that typically appealen to the woman demographic. In the end Claude shouldn’t have doubted Lorenz’s knack for making a fool of himself though. The latter eventually settled on picking a green crystal brooch as his gift ("exquisitely beautiful and not too feminine"). Claude saw the script that meant “may the wearer be granted a healthy pregnancy”, imagined Lorenz wearing that thing in front of a hypothetical delegate of almyrans, and nearly compromised himself by bursting into giggles.  
To sum up, he’d hadn’t had this much fun on a birthday in a long time. The post- party regrets started haunting him only after he’d retreated to his bed chambers. He’d been kept up late by the daunting task of deciphering what looked like a chronicle written by a bishop centuries ago, which he’d borrowed from the archive enclosed below the library. Usually students needed to seek permission to bring anything out of there, but he often chose to forget that detail.  
About the same time that his brain started to feel like it was melting from studying ancient handwriting in candle light, it decided to spring misgivings about his birthday gifts onto him, maybe as revenge. Instead of working he played with the necklace in his hands, following the reflection of the candle as it slipped across the polished obsidians, looking like distant bonfires in a night clad landscape. "Love" the script promised, the letter so thin that he could barely make it out. On festivities in Almyra, he remembered, dancers would dress themselves in nets that carried stones like this. They would rattle as people twirled and kicked during the unbridled dances that were modeled after the movement of stormwinds and maelstroms.  
A real shame that he would have to get rid of it. In hindsight, going around the monastery while wearing almyran finery didn’t seem like a very bright idea. Nobody at Garreg Marsch was necessarily aware that he came from this particular enemy country, but there were still plenty that found him suspicious, whether they told him so out loud ( Lorenz ), or kept their distrust hidden ( probably a lot of people ). Distrust had to be expected when you were an until-now-unheard-of heir popping into existence, but some of these distrusters were, unfortunately, also smart. If the wrong person saw him wear almyran finery, then what had been scattered clues — the hint of a dialect, manners that seemed foreign, a somewhat exotic appearance — could align in a moment. He did not want to be responsible for someone’s he’s-a-foreign-bastard- it-all-makes-sense-now epiphany. Explaining that it was a gift from Raphael wouldn’t help either, not if the idea had already been planted.  
The smartest thing would be to bury the necklace in the woods. Perhaps years into the future the forest would have given way to wheat fields and a farmer plowing his ground would be pleasantly surprised. Burying it seemed like such a rotten thing to do though, and he could only blame Raphael for giving him that feeling. The guy had been ridiculously moved when he’d claimed he would wear his present every day, practically sobbing. Now Claude was stuck figuring out the least jerky way he could tell him that he had been joking. Not that he didn’t look good in this necklace. Jewelry made him appear sweet at syrup.  
A part of him, which voted for sparing Raphael’s feelings, delicately proposed that maybe he didn’t need to take such drastic measures; if he only wore it inside the Golden Deer classroom would the risk be so high?  
He was pretty sure that this was his human decency speaking, and that seemed like an important thing to hear out. Also, it could look equally suspicious if he got rid of the almyran trinket too quickly — being paranoid was seriously crippling his ability to be decisive.  
A compromise then: he would wear the necklace tomorrow in front of the class, then he would fake a skin rash to make it seem like something in the metal cord was giving him an allergic reaction. Unfortunate, but even though he had really, really, really wanted to keep wearing Raphel’s gift, he could hardly be held accountable for the reactions of his body, right? It wasn’t personal; the necklace was still a good gift. You don’t need to cry Raphael.  
This plan sounded itchy and perhaps not feasible if you thought about it too much, but anybody who had ever worn earrings would know how your ears could sporadically decide to become inflamed. Hopefully people would just swallow the excuse. He could settle with a “hopefully” instead of a “definitely”; being paranoid was too tiring. All this pondering because of a simple trinket.  
Fortunately he didn’t need to debate over what needed to be done with the birthday letters. Those he knew he had to destroy.  
From the far end of the desk where he'd collected them in a pile, uncle Nader’s stickfigure- handwriting nettled his eyes. Only after spending some time contemplating, could Claude maybe phantom why he'd had sent him a non- encrypted letter, where in he openly displayed their familial connection and referred to him as “Khalid”. Nader had been vocal about how annoying he found it that all the correspondence between members of the royal family had to be in code, often pointing out that, since they used carrier hawks, there would be no untrustworthy middlemen between sender and receiver anyway. This time he’d completely ignored the rule. The sentences, stripped of their encryptions, looked as irregular to Claude as a person without their clothing.  
Nader probably thought it was all fine and dandy since the lengthy congratulation to his favorite nephew didn’t include any state secrets, but if wearing an almyran necklace was precarious, then this letter was downright condemnation. Nader had even attached a bag of almyran pine needles in a ribbon around the hawk's leg; they should add the epithet “as dangerous to his allies as he is to his enemies” to his name.  
Grumbling Claude took a pinch of travel- squishy needles, rolled it a ball and popped it into his mouth. An achingly nostalgic taste popped onto his tongue, minty and burning. He recalled how the old nannies had scolded him about his habit of stuffing his face with pine. Chewing needles straight from the branches was typical of old orchard labourers or soldiers, and a prince ought to be more dignified. Nader had laughed at such notions, inviting him to climb trees and eat as much pine as he pleased from the acres of forest stretching outside his fortress. Damn, this reminiscing was making him feel dangerously forgiving of his uncle’s near- sabotage.  
Why shouldn’t you be allowed to chew the needles fresh anyway? The taste was stronger that way, a round- house kick compared to the tea people in Fódlan brewed on imported needles that were months- old and dry. He leaned his head back as the burn in his mouth settled into a comfortable numbness. The good thing about edible presents like this one was that he would dispose of it naturally. The letters on the other hand would have to be burned, Nader’s as well as those from his parents, which were properly encrypted but still something he could never allow anyone else to see.  
A shame — it had been awhile since anyone had updated him about family and home. His mom wrote at length about the dysentery plague in the south, the amount of stress it caused “your father” and how stress made him act like an anxious race horse (“the amount of pacing he’s been doing, I swear he might as well have walked to your school and back”). The complaints were worded mirthfully, but he could sense the relief between paragraphs when she reported that the food relief the crown had organised seemed to have helped the people affected and quelled the death toll, making the mood in the castle much less tense.  
His dad touched upon the subject as well, though he did it mostly to praise his wife about her commitment when organizing the land's medics in response to the sickness (“a flurry of engagement as usual”). Neither seemed apologetic about bringing up the topic of plague on his birthday, but Claude supposed both knew he wanted to stay informed about the situation in his homeland.  
The rest of the letters were the kind of description of day- to- day activities, mixed with questions about his own life, that was to be expected. It seemed his half brothers were still finding new ways to get into trouble and lose face. The quips his mother made about them made Claude snort with laughter and promise himself to memorise the wittier lines for personal use. Around this time of year his family would start looking forward to the great harvest festivals, and the bees in the garden were more active than ever, swarming over each and every starflower.  
He found himself brushing his fingers across the decoded translations he swiftly penned above the original paragraphs, his parents’ names and the sentences that burst with personality that couldn't be replicated. The parchment scritched rough beneath his thumb. He tried to imagine the sound of the goose pen just like that, when it put down the words inside the marble walls of the royal palace leagues away from here. All he needed to do was close his eyes and the white columns and gleaming spires would appear on his retinas, as they had looked when he last travelled away from them, the ivy that clung to the balconies and the canals with spring water flowing through them. If he let himself linger in the memories long enough, the scent of myrrh, which permeated pretty much every building in Almyra, would start to tickle his nose as a particularly imposing memory. It made him feel ... Not homesick — he thought, but then he saw that his thumb was black from the amount of times he’d smoothed it across the paper and he had to concede that he did miss home a bit.  
Not a I-won’t-be-able-to-sleep-tonight bit, but he was reminded about how cramped and chilly his room here was. It seemed every castle in Fódlan needed to be this claustrophobic granite fortress, hardly any bright and airy rooms where you could stretch your figurative wings. Well now he had to stop reminiscing before he got depressed.  
Sighing, he folded the letters between two fingers and offered them to the candle, watching as it greedily reached up and singed a corner…  
...Blamm!  
Claude spun toward the door, then lunged for the bow he stored beneath the bed. He only started to wonder what the noise could have been when he was already busy unwrapping the leather from around the preemptively stringed weapon. If it was a raider, then that person would be greeted by an arrow in the kneecap the moment the door was kicked open. Then again, a group of raiders making their way into the academy seemed unlikely. Had the sound come from an extraordinarily clumsy assassin?  
The muffled swearing and metallic scraping that followed, whoever had caused the ruckus seeming to be staying in place to fix whatever they had broken, made this second possibility seem just as unlikely. You could never know for sure though. One of his would- be assassins had once tried to lure him close by pretending to be a servant with a broken leg and pleading for his help. There was always that small possibility — Paranoia my old friend, but for the record: he really wasn’t that convinced a serial killer was waiting for him outside. Facing the door with his body turned sideways and sneaking forward was only just-in-case. Completely tensed, he turned the lock, pushed with his shoulder and — instead of an assassin he stared at Lysethia.  
She stared back, her hands busy with not quite managing to prop upward one of the huge barrels where students stored all the cleaning supplies that belonged to the dorms. A batch of sponges that looked like chartwheels of yellow cheese fell out of the opening and bounced past her slippered feet, then over the edge of the second floor walkway, tumbling down to the courtyard several meters below, More stuff seemed like they would follow soon. Her arms were trembling terribly, caught in the position where they could not manage to lift the barrel entirely, but she obviously didn’t want to let go.  
His presence didn’t exactly make things better. Her blush was visible even with the moonlight making everything pale. She took a step back, as if wanting to retreat from the situation, without looking, and put her foot down on a fallen broom handle. With a shriek of dismay she pivoted backward, crashing down together with the barrel. Floor mops, buckets, soap and dustrags tumbled over her in a cacophony of clatters and thumbs.  
Instinctively reaching out to help, Claude started forward, only to hesitate because this was Lysethia and he had a healthy respect for her easily bruised pride, then scolded himself for getting apprehensive and rushed to her side anyway.  
– You are not hurt are you? he said as he pushed away the floor mops that trapped her legs, taking a loose grip around her arm just in case the excessive flailing she was doing would cause her to roll off the second floor together with the sponges. ( Why didn’t they have railings up here? It was a fifteen feet drop and teenagers got drunk ).  
– Stupid … Get off me, Lysethia snarled — To him or to the brooms, he wasn’t sure.  
The silk robe she wore seemed too thin for the fairly breezy night, her thin shoulder trembling beneath his hand, though that could also be from rage. With a discreet eye he scanned for any wounds on her, as well as he could with only the light from inside his room and the moon at hand. The fiery curses coming from her at least indicated that she hadn’t hit her head in any nasty way.  
– What are you doing out in the hallways? he asked after she managed to sit up.  
She gasped and snapped around, like a gazelle who thought she’d seen a leopard’s movement in the darkness, then agitated eyes turned to him.  
– Claude, there was a ghost. I saw it.  
Ghost hunting. Flattened beneath a barrel because she was chasing ghosts.  
– With a white sheet and everything?  
He couldn’t help it. Lysithea should know better than to breach that subject with him. Predictably her face turned furious. She shot to her feet, pushing away his arm.  
– I’m not joking. It snuck into my room and dug through my stuff. I was chasing it, but some idiot had decided to place this barrel in the middle of the path.  
She delivered a kick to a nearby bucket. It flew in a wide arc over the courtyard, sailing almost to the wall across the yard before it bounced against the cobble. Clang! Clang! Clang!  
The second after the noise died out Lysithea cursed and clutched her toes.  
– Now I’ve hurt my foot too. Stupid ... Stupid …  
– If you didn’t want to walk into things you should have brought a lantern, he continued to tease recklessly, because at this point he prefered she focused her ire on him rather than fracturing her toes kicking another solid object.  
– Use a light that tells the ghost that it’s being pursued? Great idea. Why do I even talk about this with you of all people?  
Exactly what he was wondering. To him, this seemed like the result of a vivid nightmare; not paranormal activity. He consulted with himself on whether or not he wanted to strike up that debate with her.  
Thunk!  
Something slammed from within a room close to his. By the sound of it the occupant had thrown a boot at his door. Claude saw which room it was and felt his blood run cold.  
– Be quiet, or I swear I’m gonna kill you, Felix’s voice drawled from inside in the most terrifying half asleep threat that Claude had ever heard.  
The terror of the Blue Lion- house was not the only one disturbed by the ruckus. Claude could see the door to Sylvain’s room crack open and the man peeking through, joined by a brown hairball that was likely the bed- head of his companion for the night, peering from below his chin. Sylvain would be good spy material because his talent for smuggling girls past Sethet’s watchful gaze was the real deal.  
Since his other two neighbors had been woken up, Claude turned toward Loren’s door with baited breath. If there was anybody he did not want to experience in a sleep deprived state, it was him. Luckily, it seemed Lorenz slept like a log submerged in a swamp.  
– Is something happening up here?  
The authoritarian sounding voice coming from below did not belong to Lorenz, but Claude felt himself go taut with dismay all the same. He’d changed his mind, the stickler he least of all wanted to deal with right now was Leonie.  
Lysithea was also noticing all the attention she had attracted and freezed up in the way of the startled animal, anguish on her face as she glanced down at the barrel. Considering how easily embarrassed she was, the thought of having to retell her mishap likely filled her with as much horror as the ghost did. She made for such a pitiful sight that Claude couldn’t help but step in. As he figured it, his reputation was used to receiving blows on a regular basis anyway.  
– Nothing to see here, just me walking into a barrel, he called down to the courtyard where Leonie was looking up at them, dressed in what he wanted to describe as a potato sack reoutfitted as a sleeping wear, concrete proof that she cared nil about what she put on unless there was a dress code to guide her.  
– Walked into a barrel?  
She sounded distrustful, maybe wondering if he was covering up some mischief — others always took him for a troublemaker, which was only accurate about half the time — and adjusted the bow slung over her shoulder ( nice to know he wasn’t the only paranoid person in school ).  
– Is that Lysithea up there? she called, squinting.  
Wow, Claude had to gape.  
Putting the archer = good eyesight- fact aside: it was the middle of the night. How could she tell?  
– Yeah, she’s up here with me, he replied, because why try to deny the obvious?  
– Why are the two of you out in the corridors at midnight?.  
Ho boy — he wasn’t worried about Leonie having her mind in the gutter, but with Sylvain it was another story. His brain had probably started overflowing with dirty speculation. Claude knew he would have to subject the guy to some serious blackmail to keep his gossipy tongue in check, to spare Lysithea’s pride if nothing else. That girl wore her honor in place of all the regalia that her family could not afford.  
At the moment though, he had to focus on sweet talking Leonie.  
– We weren’t doing anything special, Lysithea here was just…  
For the record, he had not been planning to say “ghost hunting”, but this was what Lysithea assumed going by the way she grabbed the nearest broom and smacked it across his shins.  
– You just want to make fun of me, she snapped while he curled in on himself in anguish, then stomped away in a furious like-I-care pace that was bound to have her rushing straight into another obstacle.  
– What have you done now? he heard Leonie call out accusingly, because one did not bully any of the younger students on her watch.  
She would definitely be breathing down his neck if he chased after Lysithea to make sure she didn’t hurt herself in the darkness. Jolly. This had been a long evening; maybe he could just leave Lysithea be.  
– I told you people out there to be quiet.  
Felix again, and this time it sounded like he was half way out of bed.  
– Wait up, Claude promptly ran after Lysethia.


End file.
